Have you come to a dead-end in your research project because you do not know what Connecticut county or town your ancestor was living in at the turn of the twentieth century? The Center for Connecticut Studies has acquired a powerful new tool to help you discover that hard-to-find person. The 1900 Soundex is an index on microfilm that includes information extracted from the full 1900 U.S. Census schedules.
      The 1900 Census contains many more questions than any earlier census and is especially significant because of the twenty year gap between it and the 1880 Census. In January 1921, damage related to a fire in the Commerce Room of the National Achieves destroyed most of the 1890 schedules.

      Normally, without an index, a researcher has to scroll through pages of a particular town while reading, line-by-line, the enumerator's  handwriting. Even more arduous, is a search through millions of names when a town or county is not known. One way to solve this problem is to use an index. The 1900 Soundex provides a researcher with a roll, page, and line number to the exact location of a name on the original 1900 schedules.
      Furthermore, the 1900 Soundex has a wealth of information recorded on each handwritten card. Each card provides the following:

• Full name
  
• Race
  
• Month and year of birth
  
• Age
  
• Citizenship status
  
• State and county
  
• Civil division
  
• Relationship to other people listed on the card   
  
• Page and line number to the original schedules
  
• Some cards provide the city, number, and street name.
  

     Observe the image below. [next webpage] In this case, Tenros Baker is white and 49-years old in 1900. He and his 35-year old wife, Barberra, originally from Poland, are living in Salem, New London County, CT. Their first three children were born in New York. It can be suggested that they must have moved to Connecticut between May 1897 and December 1898 because their one-year old son was born in Connecticut. More information may be available on the full 1900 Census.

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